Embrace Production as a first-class testing environment to decrease delivery costs and improve quality.

Is testing on (in) production a YOLO sign of lack of testing practices? Or a clever use of the best environment for the job?

Thorough testing before the code is merged to mainline is still important, but it’s based on assumptions and knowns. Staging on shared environments tends to be slow, unreliable, costly - and will still leave gaps to break our wheels on production. Why not learn from the only true environment by conducting safe and efficient experiments?

Follow a journey of a well-intentioned “test it all thoroughly before releasing!” 🤓 engineer to a “can’t we test this on production?” 👹 provocateur.

Testing on production is often associated with A/B testing or canary releases, but those aren’t always the best - or even applicable - techniques. We’ll look instead at shadow and dry runs, controlled experiments, survival of the fittest; how to apply these techniques and what to be aware of.

Slides